Like a Winding Sheet by Ann Petry - Essay Example

Mr. Johnson finds his job degrading with long working hours and little time for sleep and rest. His boss is a woman and “It was funny to have a white woman for a boss in a plant like this one” (Petry n.p.). His lack of interest in work often infuriates his boss. Their stern and hostile behavior makes him angry and it gets hard for him to resist the urge to beat her white employer, saying that he would never beat a woman.

Further in the story, Mr. Johnson encounters a white girl working at a coffee shop who refuses to serve him just because he is black; it could be solely Mr. Johnson’s thinking that made him think that every white person hates the black person. However, he resists his anger with his heart pounding to beat her but somehow; he learns to control his anger and walks out of the coffee shop.

Anne Petry further explores how the bad sense of humor that Mae possesses makes Johnson think that he is a black man with no respect in society. She jokingly calls him a “nigger” (Petry n.p.). Her bad sense of humor provokes him to take out the anger, frustration, and humiliation he encountered the entire day on her. The story projects how the evils of racism were a bitter part of reality in American society in 1946. The story revolves around two main themes such as racial discrimination and domestic abuse.

The domestic abuse that Mae faced was the outcome of the psychological aggression that was brought into Mr. Johnson due to the humiliation he faced at the hands of two white women. He hated to raise his fist against a woman but his aggression let him do that but this led to the death of his family’s belief, not to hit on any female. Anne Petry explains how our bottled aggressions and frustrations make us do things that we consider immoral. Johnson is a colorful example of a man who fails to control his motions unwinding his sheets of anger and frustration on his wife. Read More